A typical user of electronic devices may store data files at a variety of different places including hard drives on personal computers, transportable media such as CD's, DVDs, USB storage devices and portable hard drives, as well as on remote storage devices accessible using the Internet, often referred to as the “cloud”. When users want to share these files with others, they have customarily made copies of the files and provided them on a transportable media or uploaded copies of the files electronically as an attachment to an email message.
With the expansion of cloud based services and social networks, new ways to share information have evolved (e.g. public and private online posts), but the sharing of actual data items is still done in a traditional manner where all the data must be present at a common location. For example, sharing data that is stored in the cloud is done in conjunction with emails or social contacts where, once a remote data item is selected, options are provided to share the data item via email or social networks. After a file or folder is shared with one or more recipients, the recipients typically receive a share link in the form of a uniform resource locator (URL) that references the shared file or root folder on the remote server. Clicking on the URL may direct the recipient to a web page that displays the shared data items for viewing and downloading or the link may be a direct download link to download the shared data item to the recipient's computing device.
When a user wants to share several files in a single share URL, the user is typically required to move all desired files to a single folder or compress all the files into a single archive file (e.g., .zip or .rar). Accordingly, to share multiple files, folders, or a combination of files and folders requires duplication of all data items in a compressed archive or grouping the data items by moving them into a single common root folder in order to allow the user to make a single data item selection. If multiple files and folders are not grouped together in this manner then multiple share links are needed, one for each data item, because each data item would not share a common root file path. Thus, the prior art is limited to one share link or URL per root file path where the recipient would have access to all files residing within the root file path (e.g. a shared folder with several data items).
For these reasons, there exists a need for a solution that allows a user to share several selections of data items, regardless of path location and without requiring grouping or moving of the data items, and provides a single share URL that makes all the data items available to the intended share recipient(s) at once.